Prompting Part XXIV
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IMPORTANT! Spoilers for aired episodes are now being allowed on this area of the meme, without warning. If you do not want to encounter spoilers, please prompt at our Spoiler-Free Prompt Post.
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Prompts from this post can be filled on the Overflow Post
IMPORTANT! Spoilers for aired episodes are now being allowed on this area of the meme, without warning. If you do not want to encounter spoilers, please prompt at our Spoiler-Free Prompt Post.
( Read more... )
There's a coat hook on the inside of his door, where he hanged his coat every day but Sunday. Early morning rite, just him and the calm gelid light filling the office, before day broke into its usual hurly-burly of voices and knocks and the earthy solid smell of coffee and the first bleat of his phone.
In the days when his work was a thing of joy.
"Trust me, Lestrade, if it were my call you'd be waving a lollipop in Hounslow for the rest of your days. You fucking amateur. But no, looks like the Big Blue Boss wants to play softly-softly in your case."
"Sir -"
"Shut up. Just - shut up. We're holding one and only one press conf for this shit, and you're not on it. You're not to talk of that man, not here, not outside here, he's done with, blotted out, he's finished, and if I hear you've so much as uttered his name in public you'll find yourself wishing it was Hounslow. Do I make myself clear?"
"..."
"You'll need to work on that look, too. You better be a hard worker, Lestrade. We've redeployed your team but Gregson could do with a hand, never been one for the paperwork. Off with you, and remember to keep your gob shut.
On the second day, he hangs the hat onto the window fastener. The window faces the office door across his desk and is high enough for the latch to come at eye-level with any random visitor. Sometimes, Lestrade lifts his head from the lumpy sea of papers and looks at the hat in all the gathering daylight.
Sometimes he holds out his hand and touches a fingertip to it.
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Oh, author, lovely! Poor Lestrade, and I can't wait to see where this goes.
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But one of them had said "hats off to the freak" with a full-voiced chuckle, in the buoyant high of success, and Sally had chimed in at once, "speaking of hats...", and the next thing he knew, Lestrade was walking down the aisles in Harrods. Blessing Signor Ricoletti and his club foot for letting them catch up with him in the midpoint of sales.
The hat had been Sally's idea but the choice was his. Sherlock probably knew it as soon as he'd ripped off the silver paper: he'd teased Greg mercilessly as they left the conference room.
"Grey. Now why would you chose a grey one, I wonder?"
"Yeah, well, I did look for orange, but -"
"A memory jogger, perhaps? In case I might happen to delete your name? What a sad lack of confidence, Inspector."
"As if. Nah, take it as the resident greyhead's compliment. To your little grey cells. Though Sally says you'll be bringing galoshes back next."
He'd seen the hat again once, when he'd been leaving 221B after arresting Sherlock. The hat sat on the skull, tilted cheekily sideways, its topknot gleaming under the pale domestic neons. (Trust Sherlock to avoid rosy lampshades.) Greg had spared at it a glance and turned his head, forgetting it in the heated rush of craziness that had followed. Until it came back to him later on, the words, the voice. Merciless.
Sad lack of confidence, Inspector.
Now there is no one to tell that he did, in fact, trust, well before the eleventh hour, trusted as soon as Sherlock's finger brushed his skin. And so he's kept the hat. The hat may be grey and empty, but the hat will bloody well heed Sherlock's words and serve as a memento. Here, where it can also be a denial. A protest. And a penance.
He turns his head and smiles at the hat. "The great Sherlock Holmes - got it spot on, didn't you? Except for the name. It's not about me, this. It never was, but it's all right. Because I'm gonna see that you get your name back, mon gosse, if that's the last thing I do. Now shut up and let me think."
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Oh, still lovely! The last two paragraphs, especially, and Lestrade (resident greyhead!) joking about getting it in orange...
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I'm trying to reread, but I keep coming back to Lestrade addressing Sherlock in French, and saying that - my heart keeps stuttering when I read this line. Such a lovely idea.
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Lestrade finds that his is a slow task. Even though Richard Brook quickly proves to have been as elusive as his name, the inquest on Sherlock's death - only echoed back to him in tattered whispers along the Met corridors - seems to dissolve just as quickly. As case after case fails to prove the dead man wrong, Lestrade waits for a statement that never comes. The Met, obviously, have an omertà of their own. All he can do is collect the odds and ends that will vindicate Sherlock, compile a case on the side, and wait in that grey zone where no lie quite survives, but no truth can be spoken, not yet.
The press, meanwhile, have their cream tea over "Bluffin' Sherlock", smack their lips happily and move on to the next fleshpots.
But as the first winter becomes entangled with the second year, and John Watson sends news of his impending marriage, Lestrade becomes suddenly aware of a change in the air.
It begins with DI Stanley Hopkins signing all of his reports twice over with his initials, something he's never done before. Since Hopkins doubles as their liaison officer with Human Resources and the Met's Sports Club, this means "SH" becomes a well-known sign on their floor.
Greg grins quietly, remembering how young Hopkins stuttered the first time he had to step into his office and address the hat, an inch to Greg's temple. But Hopkins was one of the rare officers Sherlock had treated decently and he's not surprised at this ingenious tip of the hat - or to the hat.
And suddenly, the tips are everywhere. Someone hacks into the Met's computer system and for twenty-four hours, a photograph of a young man in an orange blanket graces every screen of every living official. Graffitis of "Wrong! SH" and more or less proper variants can be found in very cubicle of the gents. Greg finds that the giant coffee distributor now answers to a name and, for the first time in two years, stops Sally on her way out.
"The Freak, eh? Good move, Sergeant."
Sally looks down at her shoes. "Had to do my bit, right? I mean, you know how it is. Either you have to wait for ten bloody minutes or you don't get any change, or it pours so fast the cup topples and you feel like punching the thing into next Friday. And the coffee is too hot, and you can forget all about sugar. But it always delivers. Always."
"Donovan."
She raises her eyes to him then, dark and glistening in the poodled lights of the car park - the rain has begun. "I'm sorry," she whispers. "Not for what I did, because it still feels like it was the right thing to do. It's what you taught us, remember? Never to hush what you felt was wrong? But now, I know it was - not good. Right, but not good. And if I hadn't -"
"Sally," he tries again, helplessly aware that it should be Sherlock, not him, casting for the words that absolve. Not that Sherlock Holmes would be bothered with absolution, of course. Trust the bastard to deputize such trivia to Lestrade even from the grave. Lestrade takes in a damp breath.
"Sally, lass. They must have told you, Gregson and the lot - I've kept the hat. His hat. Would you like to see it?"
And he doesn't have to say more. She bends her head to the crook of his arm and as he listens to the first warm whimper rising from her throat, he lets the March rain envelop them, ready to see what will come next.
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When the end comes, it comes, proverbially enough, with a whisper and a bang.
Lestrade is in his office, tying a few extra rosettes in Gregson's red tape and wondering, not for the first time, if the Met has ever heard that the Letter Killeth. Probably not, or the Met wouldn’t demand that its officers go on taking down statements after an arrest has been made. But this is a riddle that not even Sherlock could crack in his bravura days, and Greg lets out a relieved grunt when his phone chirps in.
The voice is middle-to-deep, stern and to the point. The voice is also a loved voice, a long-lost voice and a voice that, up to the last three years, quickened every pore in Gregory Lestrade’s body to a secret prickle of expectancy.
On the negative side, the voice makes no sense at all.
"Greg. When I tell you to duck, duck."
A man's soul and a man's mechanical response to the unexpected are often more closely knit than we give them credit for. Two years ago, it would have been Greg's blood, the burn of it on his face, answering the sick fuck on the active end of the joke. Give it twelve months and he'd have let himself speak first, breath struggling, shocked into a curse, before he started to process the words.
But the truth is that in that last stretch of year, he has been selfish, selfish; urging them to raise the dead man’s name east and west, yeah, from the Yard’s bogs to the Yard’s Intranet (heading the senior officers’ petition, the pick of them too, to have the inquiry reopened) until they were well and truly haunted to his savage joy. It is as if they’d all prepared him for this moment, shaping a ghost for him till the ghost could be claimed at last, and what’s better for the claiming than a voice on a phone, bodiless for all its sharp-soft tones.
Or it could be that Lestrade’s heart, another stubborn git in its own right, was only waiting for this moment.
Whatever the cause, Sherlock’s voice says Now and Lestrade’s fifteen years of football practice kick in. He barely hears the whistle of air in his sharp dive to the side, but he can't miss the sound of impact. When he looks up, the hat is no longer on the latch and there is a bullet in the window, stuck inside a few cracked rings of glass like a fly in a web.
In the common office, there is another crash-and-bang, and he finds himself staring at the young official whose name always escaped him - perhaps because he was such a clear copy of Dimmock. The young man is sitting before his computer screen with a dot, red and trickling, on his forehead. Later on, Lestrade will find that the news on the computer screen concern a certain Moran’s suicide in vague and unplumbed circumstances and a Soho bedsitter.
"The odds," the voice comments (and it makes even less sense now it no longer speaks on the phone), "were fifty-fifty. He could kill you or he could kill himself, though he was gracious enough to prove me right on both accounts. Lestrade, I swear you are going to faint."
In the whole nine years of their acquaintance, Lestrade has only once questioned Sherlock’s word. As he keels forward into an ungracious heap, his last thought is that will not be charged with a second offence.
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When the end comes, it comes, proverbially enough, with a whisper and a bang.
Lestrade is in his office, tying a few extra rosettes in Gregson's red tape and wondering, not for the first time, if the Met has ever heard that the Letter Killeth. Probably not, or the Met wouldn’t demand that its officers go on taking down statements after an arrest has been made. But this is a riddle that not even Sherlock could crack in his bravura days, and Greg lets out a relieved grunt when his phone chirps in.
The voice is middle-to-deep, stern and to the point. The voice is also a loved voice, a long-lost voice and a voice that, up to the last three years, quickened every pore in Gregory Lestrade’s body to a secret prickle of expectancy.
On the negative side, the voice makes no sense at all.
"Greg. When I tell you to duck, duck."
A man's soul and a man's mechanical response to the unexpected are often more closely knit than we give them credit for. Two years ago, it would have been Greg's blood, the burn of it on his face, answering the sick fuck on the active end of the joke. Give it twelve months and he'd have let himself speak first, breath struggling, shocked into a curse, before he started to process the words.
But the truth is that in that last stretch of year, he has been selfish, selfish; urging them to raise the dead man’s name east and west, yeah, from the Yard’s bogs to the Yard’s Intranet (heading the senior officers’ petition, the pick of them too, to have the inquiry reopened) until they were well and truly haunted to his savage joy. It is as if they’d all prepared him for this moment, shaping a ghost for him till the ghost could be claimed at last, and what’s better for the claiming than a voice on a phone, bodiless for all its sharp-soft tones.
Or it could be that Lestrade’s heart, another stubborn git in its own right, was only waiting for this moment.
Whatever the cause, Sherlock’s voice says Now and Lestrade’s fifteen years of football practice kick in. He barely hears the whistle of air in his sharp dive to the side, but he can't miss the sound of impact. When he looks up, the hat is no longer on the latch and there is a bullet in the window, stuck inside a few cracked rings of glass like a fly in a web.
In the common office, there is another crash-and-bang, and he finds himself staring at the young official whose name always escaped him - perhaps because he was such a clear copy of Dimmock. The young man is sitting before his computer screen with a dot, red and trickling, on his forehead. Later on, Lestrade will find that the news on the computer screen concern a certain Moran’s suicide in vague and unplumbed circumstances and a Soho bedsitter.
"The odds," the voice comments (and it makes even less sense now it no longer speaks on the phone), "were fifty-fifty. He could kill you or he could kill himself, though he was gracious enough to prove me right on both accounts. Lestrade, I swear you are going to faint."
In the whole nine years of their acquaintance, Lestrade has only once questioned Sherlock’s word. As he keels forward into an ungracious heap, his last thought is that will not be charged with a second offence.
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I'm so so glad that you managed to get that tricksy ghost to behave. Because, like all the other parts, this is magnificently lovely and perfect.
I love the description of the 'loved voice,' and how Greg would have reacted over the years and this line: It is as if they’d all prepared him for this moment, shaping a ghost for him till the ghost could be claimed at last, and what’s better for the claiming than a voice on a phone, bodiless for all its sharp-soft tones. And Greg's stubborn git of a heart, and, well, all the rest (this part and the rest too).
Thank you so much, anon! You are doing a wonderful job with this fill!
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